Click here to watch the full video interview.

AusGamers: Okay, we're here with an absolute comicbook legend, Joe Madureira to talk about his big foray into the videogames industry, Darksiders, which we've talked a lot about already on AusGamers - Joe, thanks for hanging out with us; how long had you been thinking about [Darksiders] before it came to fruition?

Joe Madureira: It all happened kind of quickly once the idea cropped up. You know, we had formed Vigil Games and there were just a few of us at the time and we were trying to decide on what the game was going to be; we knew we wanted it to be an action/adventure game - we love classic adventure games like Zelda and Metroid, but we wanted it to have a little bit more combat - and we just threw so many ideas out but no nobody really liked them.

Then I was driving home in my car from one of those meetings and it just came to me: near future, apocalypse, angels and demons. And then I thought about the Four Horseman, and I actually called the guys from my car and everyone was like "dude that sounds badass". So we had another meeting and I started doing drawings and it just kind of clicked for us. It was one of those things when we told people about it, they reacted right away. You know, there's something about hearing "Four Horseman" and "end of the world"; it's stuff people can latch on to - you don't need to explain anything. It's the ultimate good and evil; angels and demons, heaven and hell, Four Horseman, Earth destroyed - you know that mankind being destroyed is a bad thing, right. So it's just easy to grasp and it sounds epic and it seemed like the perfect backdrop for the kind of game we wanted to make.



AGN: And of course, there's plenty of room for poetic license...

Joe: Absolutely. I mean everyone has heard of the Four Horseman, you know, even people who haven't played games before. My parents know who the Four Horseman are. But there's really no information about them, if you look at The Book of Revelation where they're mentioned, there's, like, one sentence about them. So people know nothing about them but they still sound so cool, and so we liked that mystique and we like that freedom to really develop them as our own characters while maintaining some of that familiarity.

AGN: How was it for you having all this concept art seeing it transformed into 3D?

Joe: It's amazing. It's definitely one of the most rewarding aspects of the job, you know, even in just conceptualising them; you have to think about them in 3D, as living, breathing creatures. If I'm feeling lazy in [drawing] comics I can just cut the image off at the legs and just not draw that part or have him facing a certain way so you don't see what's on the back or whatever, but in 3D you really have to think it through, you know, how does he move, what're his attacks like. Then game design comes into play, but once you have all of that together, you know, with sound and stuff, it's really awesome.



AGN: Now a big misconception about this game is a lot of people think of God of War or Devil May Cry, but it's so far off the mark in those comparisons and you mentioned two great games before, Zelda and Metroid, we're those two games the key foundations for gameplay when you first thought of this game?

Joe: Yeah, totally. We wanted the trappings and structure of old-school adventure games, but we knew we had to have all the next-gen bells and whistles, you know, cinematic deaths and all that stuff to compete with the flashier combat-based games, and you know, there are puzzles in the game, but War isn't the most cerebral character, he's all about killing - he's a professional killer. And so we just wanted to make sure we made the combat look as kickass as possible and as a result, it ends up being what we show a lot on screenshots and video which is what people react to the most, so of course it's going to draw comparisons to those games and you know it's oretty flattering, those are awesome games to be compared to, but I think we'll find our identity once people get to play the game a little more.

AGN: So your role beyond being the creator of, I guess the franchise now and the game's universe - how much input have you had from a gameplay perspective? I've played the game a fair bit and it definitely had a whole Legend of Zelda thing going on with the dungeon crawling and over-world - was that all you?

Joe: No, we all sort of have the hive mind at Vigil and we all knew the kind of game we wanted to make and we're all fans of those kinds of games. I was heavily involved early on with War's attacks and his special abilities and just in high-level design in terms of what types of areas you'd be playing in but honestly, as we started building the team it just started growing on its own. It has the vision of so many people, I definitely couldn't take credit for all of it, I don't even think we could make the game it is now without the team we have now because everyone contributes so much.

So it's really the game our studio wants to make as a whole and I think when you're working on something you're passionate about you get better results and so I think we've been lucky we found these people when we were starting out who love the same types of games as we do.



AGN: Well it's already received a bunch of "best of E3" nominations, I love it - I've played a whole bunch of it. What would you like to see happen to this franchise beyond release? Can we start hoping for awesome movies or anything like that? Is that something you'd like to see?

Joe: Yeah, obviously if the demand is there it's gonna happen. There have been some rumblings and rumours about interest in film rights and things like that and obviously that would be awesome, but we're just trying to focus on the game and that's really THQ's call. At this point we just want the first game to do really well and get good reviews so people will know that Vigil is a cool studio that makes great games and then hopefully they'll give us a shot at the sequel so we can have four-player co-op with the Four Horseman! (Laughs) no, I don't know, that's pretty ambitious...

AGN: It's a no-brainer.

Joe: Yeah.

AGN: Thanks Joe, you're an absolute legend and the game looks great!

Joe: You're welcome.

For more media and info, check out our Darksiders game page. We also have a full hands-on preview you can check out right here.